We know that the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-ordered freeze on subsidies to tertiary institutions is going to pinch many students where it already hurts.

So we understand where the silent protest that University of the West Indies students mounted on their Mona campus last week is coming from.

Nevertheless, we can’t support them.

For the decision to cap subsidies to tertiary institutions at last year’s budget level is but one of the many painful IMF-inspired pills that we have to swallow as a country in order to recover from the financial cancer that is eating us down.

The Jamaica Debt Exchange (JDX) programme is another.

And as time goes on, various sectors and interest groups will feel the awful pinch that is an inescapable consequence of the route we have chosen to take ourselves out of our untenable state of affairs.

So what do we do?

Do we take the pills and find innovative ways to alleviate the pain, or do we mobilise into various protest groups and bellyache about how unfair life is?

According to our Friday edition, Ms Shikisha Cowan, vice-president of public relations for the University of Technology’s Students’ Union, has taken issue with the Government’s decision to channel funds to the lower-education levels at the expense of the tertiary sector.

“We must be able to educate our people to the highest levels and not just to the secondary level. We need people who can compete globally in order to make Jamaica globally competitive,” she says.

True that.

But Miss Cowan and those on whose behalf she speaks are big people, who we would like to believe have benefited from some form of education at the early childhood, primary and secondary levels. We would like to think said education has, in some way, equipped them with the confidence and ability to make things happen for themselves and, by extension, the society that they professes to care about, when the going gets tough.

For this, after all, is what education, at all levels, should be about; equipping individuals to teach themselves how to get by, legitimately, in this hard and many times unfair world.

Otherwise, the system is failing and the Government has a moral obligation to fix it for the benefit of those who don’t have the money to circumvent it. According to Mr Andrew Holness, the minister of education, this will require a rebalancing of resources to address the glaring disparity between the investment of $14 billion on tertiary education as opposed to $2 billion on early childhood education.

Because if we press on in the misguided notion that it is okay to pump the bulk of the available resources into the tertiary sector at the expense of an early childhood sector which will, without the necessary attention, continue to produce characterless hoodlums who will eventually kill us all, we’re doomed.

So we would invite Ms Cowan and the others who have not yet seen fit to join the rest of us in the real world to thank God for what they have received so far. Step out of their idealistic bubbles and go figure out a way to support themselves.

Because we can point to many, who with far less resources than they, are making a sterling contribution to this society.

You don’t see them jumping up and down in front of the media cameras every time things don’t go their way, because they understand that life is what it is.

And that really, is the true measure of education.